Christmas Carolling
by shiiki
Summary: Nico shares a painful childhood memory. [Christmas giftfic for strawberrygirl2000]


**Summary:** Nico shares a painful childhood memory. For **strawberrygirl2000** , who requested Solangelo fic with the prompt, _Do something fluffy. Christmas related, maybe along the lines of Nico remembering going to church with his sister when he was little, and once he realized he was gay, he thought he was wrong. Will comforts him and blah blah blah, you make up the rest._

 **A/N** : Happy Christmas, **strawberrygirl2000**! I'm delighted to write something just for you, after all your enthusiasm and cheerleading this entire year. You've made sharing my stories such a joy and I hope this little fic has just the right balance of angst and comfort for you. Your prompt took a life of its own so I hope you don't mind the extra details that made their way in!

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 **Christmas Carolling**

 _A Christmas giftfic for_ _ **strawberrygirl2000**_

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The question wasn't even fully out of Will's mouth when Nico refused.

Will probably shouldn't have been surprised. He'd never actually heard Nico sing, not even in the shower, and who didn't do that from time to time? Will had heard plenty of tone-deaf demigods warbling in the showers at camp (*coughPercyJacksoncough*). Just not Nico. Never Nico.

But singing carols wasn't really the point.

'You don't even have to sing if you don't want to. No one will know if you just mouth along.'

Nico glowered silently. Will put on his best pleading look.

'Please? It would mean a lot to me.'

'You want me to go Christmas-carolling with you and your mom,' Nico repeated, his eyebrows lifting higher and higher, as though to punctuate the absurdity of each word. 'At _church_.'

'It's our Christmas tradition. Weren't you saying you'd decided to be less of a Grinch this year?'

Nico wrung his hands. 'I thought it meant decorating a tree! Or helping with the camp secret santa! Not—church carols!'

Will sighed. 'I guess we could just go Christmas shopping instead.'

He thought that would be the end of it. Nico conceded to going to the mall—another place he usually avoided, especially at holiday season ('If I want to be surrounded by vapid crowds I can just go to Asphodel,' he'd growl. 'At least those zombies make way when I'm coming through.') He even followed Will patiently from shop to shop, carrying the bags of gifts for their friends and Will's enormous extended family. Nico complained that Will's dad was like the proverbial stork—he never departed without leaving a baby—and though Will rolled his eyes, he had to agree. The Apollo cabin had become the most populated now that Hermes was no longer the default for strays.

At first, Will carefully steered Nico away from the packs of charity carollers roaming the mall, but then he noticed that Nico hardly seemed to be affected by these aggressively happy singers as they belted out Christmassy cheer and shook their collecting tins in people's faces. Nico even dropped a handful of quarters for some of them.

Maybe it was just the idea of being one of the singers that freaked Nico out. Will could understand—these groups could be overzealous. But he hadn't asked Nico to go carolling for charity. It was just a small service at his mom's church in the country, with an old-fashioned organ and candles and a traditional atmosphere that he thought Nico might actually enjoy. There weren't many other places that were still reminiscent of the 1940s.

It wasn't until the girl at the Christian Fellowship booth outside the mall accosted them with a bright smile and a pamphlet that Will began to connect the dots. The moment she pressed the pamphlet into Nico's hands and demanded, 'Have you heard of our saviour, Lord Jesus Christ,' Will saw tiny cracks snake across the pavement, like Nico was about to summon skeletal reinforcements in response.

He put a warning hand on Nico's arm. 'We're fine, thanks,' he said to the evangelist.

But the girl clamped her hand around Nico's wrist. 'He died for your sins, you know.'

Nico wrenched himself out of both of their grips and stalked off through the car park. The ground rumbled, but fortunately did not split open.

'Sorry,' Will muttered to the evangelist, and hurried to catch up with Nico.

'Jesus loves you!' she called after them.

Will rolled his eyes. 'Nico! Nico, wait up!'

Nico was halfway across the parking lot by the time Will caught him. The evangelical pamphlet was crushed into a tiny ball in his hands.

'She probably didn't mean any harm,' Will said.

Nico shook the crumpled pamphlet at Will. 'You wanted to wait around until the part where she tells us we're going to hell?'

A lightbulb went off in Will's head. 'This is why you didn't want to come carolling with me and my mom, isn't it? It wasn't about singing. You're scared of church.'

'I'm not _scared,_ ' Nico said immediately. 'I just—I've been through this before. I don't want to listen again to some stuck-up priest telling me that what I am is unnatural—and wrong—' he ripped the evangelical pamphlet in half, 'and that I'm going to—' _rip,_ 'burn—' _rip,_ 'in hell—' _rip,_ 'for my sin.'

Will plucked the shreds of the pamphlet out of Nico's hands and binned it. 'First off, I'm not Catholic. We don't have a priest. Second, no one's ever had a problem with me being gay—did you really think I'd ask you to go somewhere you wouldn't be accepted? And lastly … why didn't you just tell me?'

They'd reached the far side of the parking lot by then. Nico twisted his skull ring slowly around his finger. 'It was a long time ago,' he said softly. 'You—you really want to know?'

'Of course I do,' Will said. 'What happened?'

Nico set down his shopping bags on a sidewalk bench. 'I can show you. Hazel and I have been working on something. It's a bit like shadow travel, except you go into a memory.'

'Shadow memories?'

'I guess you could call it that. If you really want to see …'

Will put his packages down next to Nico's and held out his arm. 'Show me.'

Compared to shadow-travelling, descending into Nico's memories was much more tame. Shadow travel—which Will had only done with Nico a handful of times—was a mad rush through darkness, kind of like that crazy Space Mountain rollercoaster in Disney World. This was just like fainting: the present world fading to black, a brief sensation of falling, and then new surroundings coloured themselves in.

They were in a grand cathedral filled with light and song. A dozen kids in choir robes stood in two rows behind the sanctuary, girls in front, boys behind. Will did a double-take at one of the girls near the centre—about ten years old, dark-haired with thin, high cheekbones like Nico's.

Bianca di Angelo. Will had only ever seen her that one time the Hunters had stayed at camp, but he remembered her. She wasn't much younger here than she'd been when she'd died.

Nico, who had to be about eight in this memory, was standing just behind his sister. He was so short, he was almost hidden from view even though the boys in the back were on a higher platform. It was hard to pick out any one voice from the chorus, but Will thought he could make out young Nico's clear, childish alto.

'You were a choir boy?' Will didn't know whether he wanted to laugh or pinch Nico's cheeks.

Present-day Nico scowled. 'Don't make me regret showing you.'

The song melted into a solo, taken by the boy next to Nico. He had a cherubic sort of face, with full, rosy cheeks and wide, expressive eyes. The _Gloria_ he trilled out was utterly sublime.

Young Nico clearly thought so, too, as he was gazing at the soloist with a rapturous expression on his face.

Choir practice ended, and the other children started to follow their choir director between the pews towards the vestibule of the church. Young Nico whispered something to Bianca, whose brows furrowed. Then she sighed and put an encouraging hand on his shoulder, like a blessing. She hurried to join the other children.

Young Nico tapped the soloist's shoulder and said something to him in Italian. The other boy stammered a reply, looking confused. Nico shyly held out a flower.

'Your first crush?' Will whispered. 'That's so cute.'

'Shut up and watch.'

'Nico di Angelo!' A black-robed priest came striding out of the vestry. Nico's flower fell to the ground. His crush looked between him and the angry priest, and held up his hands, shaking his head rapidly. The priest pointed down the pews and Nico's crush fled.

Nico made to follow him, but the priest put a hand on his shoulder and marched him into the vestry. The tiny room was dominated by a stained-glass panel of Jesus on the cross.

The lecture that followed was delivered in a furious flood of Italian, punctuated with a lot of gesturing towards Jesus's crucifixion and the priest crossing himself multiple times. Will didn't need to understand the language to guess at the content of this sermon.

And then he watched as the priest produced a thin birch switch and made young Nico hold out his hands …

'I think you get the picture,' present-day Nico said. He rubbed his palms tensely, as though he could feel the blows landing on his tearful eight-year-old self's hands.

When they emerged from the memory, Will put his arms around Nico. 'I'm sorry you went through that,' he said.

Nico stiffened in his arms, but didn't pull away. 'It was a long time ago.'

'But it still bothers you.'

'For five years—or seventy-five, I guess—I thought everything I felt was wrong. Unnatural. Sinful.' He shifted uncomfortably. 'Churches, choirs—they remind me of all that.'

'You know they're wrong, right? There's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with us.'

'I don't get how you're so confident about all of it. Like you're never even scared when people find out about us.'

'Because we don't have anything to hide, Nico.' Will drew back so he could look Nico in the eye. 'The people who really matter—your sister … she knew, didn't she?'

Nico's Adam's apple trembled. He nodded stiffly. 'She was the only one who understood.'

'You see? The people who matter don't care that we're gay. Not your sister, not our friends, and not my mom. And I promise no one at my church will tell us we're going to hell. But—I get why you don't want to go. I won't make you.'

Nico rubbed his skull ring. 'Maybe I could … think about it?'

'That'd be great.'

Will put his arms around Nico again. This time, Nico returned the hug.

'You know,' Will said after a moment, 'when you think about it, it's funny how the bigots try to threaten you with hell.' He poked Nico in the stomach. ' _You're_ actually the expert on hell.'

'Ha ha.'

'And even if we don't go carolling, I _am_ at least going to demand a private concert now that I know you _can_ sing …'

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 **A/N** : I hope this met expectations, **strawberrygirl2000**! You asked for 'remembering,' and I guess I kind of stretched it as far as it would go.

With regards to churches and religion, I could have loads to say about acceptance versus faux-acceptance in the Christian faith … but I won't piggyback a rant on the giftfic. But feel free to ask me if you want to know. :)

Next up, a giftfic for **Hello**!


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